Is the current league another level above the 80s and 90s?

[SannywithoutCompy]

90's vs modern goalie equipment:

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Even the tendency to go 30 feet out of the net though, positioning was seriously questionable back then

 

[habsrule4eva3089]

It will be interesting to read the thread

"Is the current league another level above the 2010s and 2020s?"

In 30 years. Time catches everyone friends. This Hockey we see today will be talked about as turtles racing one another in due time as well. Will you agree to what to the arguments then that players were not as advanced?

 

[The Panther]

It should be emphasized again this claim is pretty crazy if you are talking about the 1980s and overall talent.

Unless someone can show what I have found on this is wrong, contrary to some claims in this thread the the amount of European talent was very limited comparatively during the 1980s.


The rise of Europeans in the NHL

In other words only about 50 new European players joined the NHL during the entire 1980s, while 400 more European players had played in the NHL by 2000 which is a very dramatic difference. The numbers have gone up since then, and while there were more teams and effective NHL "slots" starting with the 1998 expansion than earlier, you still have Europeans being an even greater factor in the NHL talent pool today.

Basically during the 1980s European players were still very much the exception with mostly a few players perceived as being exceptionally talented enough for NHL teams to pursue them. The "old boys" network basically making the decisions for the NHL assumed most European players were "too soft" and would not be able to make the transition to the NHL playing style. This shift considerably in the 1990s along with the influx of former Soviet talent becoming available and eventually pursued. (Although looking over the details the shift took a portion of the 1990s, so the earlier years you still did not have the effective available talent pool being used that you did later on.)

There was a big difference between the 1990s and the 1980s, and you are really missing most of the basics of the realities of the talent pools from both eras if you fail to recognize this.

There's some truth but a lot of misinformation in your post. If you read my post earlier in this thread, I listed 46 well-known, notably successful European players in the NHL, appearing anywhere between 1980 and 1987. (I didn't even list players appearing in 1988 or 1989, which adds more notable ones.) That 46 is far, far fewer than the actual number of players who appeared during the 80s.

So, I don't know where you're getting the idea that only 50 Europeans appeared during the 1980s, but that's completely wrong.

There's some truth to what you say about the "old boys' network" of the 70s/80s not favoring European players, but that certainly didn't apply to everyone. For example, Glen Sather, Scotty Bowman, and even Mike Keenan, among others.

Also, your tabulation isn't factoring in League size. (This is the part that most people seem to miss.) Throughout the 1980s, there were 21 NHL teams (and even then, from 1980 to 1983, there were fewer roster spots per team allowed than later). From 1991 to 1993, that changed to 26 teams, a 24% increase in available jobs for NHL players. By 2000, League size reached 30 teams, a 43% increase in League size from 1991.

So, while there were certainly more European players arriving in the 90s (though this has to be offset by the fact that USSR players and most Czechs couldn't come in the 80s), the increase in raw numbers exaggerates how many more. For example, if, in 1989, there were (let's say) 65 active European NHL players, and in 1998 (27 teams) there were 150 (just guesses), it's a whopping 130% increase in European players but is actually only an 8.6% increase proportional to League size because now there are 138 more jobs available.